3. Ushahidi = Testimony
Born out of the post-election violence in Kenya in
2008, used to map reports of violence and peace
efforts throughout the country. TV was realtime fail.
4. What is Ushahidi?
Open source software for information collection,
visualization and interactive mapping.
We build tools for democratizing information,
increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for
individuals to share their stories.
Platform Community Movement
ushahidi.com
5.
6. Prototype 1
"Ushahidi", which means "testimony" in Swahili,
was a mashup that was initially developed
to map reports of violence in Kenya
after post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008.
legacy.ushahidi.com
7. Citizen reporting is about
people telling stories of
their location. And of finally
having a say in what stories
get told about their
location
Wambura Kimunyu
8. We build tools for democratizing
information, increasing transparency and
lowering the barriers for individuals to share
their stories.
We’re a disruptive organization that is
willing to take risks in the pursuit of changing
the traditional way that information flows in
the world.
openness | innovation | community
9. Quote
“We are undergoing a major technology paradigm shift.
Citizens that were once only passive recipients of
information, are now contributors to the story.
In the case of crisis mapping, it's the people on the
ground that best know the local situation.
Enabling a two-way conversation between affected
communities and support groups can allow a faster,
more effective response.
The key point is that affected groups have a voice, we
only need to listen.”
-Dale Zak, Ushahidi mobile developer
16. Disaster Response
March 2011 - 4,000+ reports, 144,974 views January 2010 - 3,584 reports, 500,000 views
Monitor fallout of tsunami and nuclear crisis Allowed Haitians to report location and needs
sinsai.info/ushahidi haiti.ushahidi.com
17. Election Monitoring
September 2011- 238 reports
August 2010 - 1525 reports, 20,000 views
Allow citizen reporting during election, radio ads with
Monitor Kenya referendum election
SMS short code number
bantuwatch.org uchaguzi.co.ke
18. Citizen Journalism
December 2010 - 319 reports, 156,859 views May 2010 - 3397 reports, 406,715 views
Help bring awareness to sexual harassment in Egypt Document human and ecological impact of the oil spill
harassmap.com oillspill.labucketbrigade.org
19. Community Use
By the City / For the City (NYC)
Integration of social media into placemaking practices, Fix Your Street (Dublin, Ireland)
which are community centered, encouraging public South Dublin County Council takes reports about
participation, collaboration and transparency. road conditions, litter and drainage.
urbandesignweek.org fixyourstreet.ie
30. Lessons
Crowdsourcing
platform must be
easy to deploy,
intuitive to use,
simple to localize
and customize
“A map is only as
useful as the process
and people to make
it happen.”
-George Chamales, Konpa Group
slidesha.re/ushahidi_lessons
35. Data Needs Relevance
Drive demand - bring people to the data
Close the feedback loop
Perhaps it’s good to have the infrastructure of feedback loops just a bit
visible now, before they disappear into our environments altogether, so that
they can serve as a subtle reminder that we have something to change, that
we can do better—and that the tools for doing better are rapidly, finally,
turning up all around us.
Thomas Goetz, Wired.
62. Capacity building in
Liberia
A sister facility to the
iHub, iLab Liberia fills a
huge gap in Monrovia’s
tech space for training
and use by local tech
guys and the NGO
community
63. Ushahidi & the iHub
represent a new Kenya
Nearly self-sustaining,
the iHub has been a
massive success for
Ushahidi, plus the
Kenyan tech community
5000+ members
120+ events
The impetus for creating Ushahidi was in response to an information flow bottleneck. I was in Kenya on holiday and what we saw on tv on the eve of the elections going awry; differed from what we saw with our own eyes. \n
Ushahidi the word: means testimony or witness in Swahili. \n
So what is Ushahidi?\nOpen source software to collection and visualize information on a map.\nOpen source means the code is free and publicly available for anyone to use.\nI personally believe Ushahidi is actually three things:\n1) Platform - open source, customizable, localizable, build upon it\n2) Community - global conversation all working towards a common goal\n3) Movement - help empower disadvantaged groups by giving them a voice\n. Academic Research Projects: This encompasses everything from MA and PHD work to field work to collaborative studies. I would encourage you to peruse our blog for all the posts on Research and Academia. The latest post went up today: \nA movement of hundreds of small movements. \n
Think of an upturned umbrella, the spokes are the channels like SMS, Email, Web, Twitter, Mobile, and everything is aggregated onto a map. Providing a visualization, a snapshot of what is going on where. \n
\nUshahidi was created to allow citizens to have a voice, “this is what I see.”\n
Why map? Why collect information? To what end? \nChanging the information flow. Surfacing what is going on even in rural areas, using available technology. \n
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And finally a quote!\n
To grow from a collaborative effort into a global community and organization. \n
It takes a team and an open source community to do this. To make the platform usable\n
It takes a team and an open source community to do this. To make the platform usable\n
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And the number of Ushahidi deployments keep on growing, now with over 15,000 maps\n
It’s also played a key role in Disaster Response.\nMost notably to monitor the fallout of tsunami and nuclear crisis in Japan.\nAlso during the Haiti earthquake response, the map allowed Haitians to report their location and needs.\n
The platform has been used for Election Monitoring.\nVote Report India and U-cha-gu-zee in Kenya are two examples.\n
It’s also been used for Citizen Journalism.\nHarrassMap helped bring awareness to sexual harassment in Egypt.\nOil Spill Crisis Map was used to document human and ecological impact of the oil spill.\n
Fixyourstreet.ie consists of a publicly accessible web site with associated mobile technologies on which non emergency issues such as graffiti, road defects, issues with street lighting, water leaks/drainage issues, and litter or illegal dumping can be reported. As promised in the programme for government, issues raised on “fixyourstreet.ie” will be responded to within 2 working days.  The response available through the website will always be given by an official of the relevant Council.\n\n
Teaching University Students - Software Development\nhttp://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2012/01/27/students-learn-programming-with-ushahidi/\nCam McDonnell has been doing this. \n
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The idea of collective intelligence is further illustrated when we saw spontaneous uses of the Crowdmap platform to collect real time information. In collaboration with Syria Tracker, Lauren Wolfe, director, Women Media Center’s is using Crowdmap to gather information about conditions on the ground. The information was meticulously collected and verified and used in the current proceedings at the United Nations. \nWMC co-founder Gloria Steinem, who spearheads WMC’s Women Under Siege, said: “At last we are gaining ways of reporting what is happening in real time to real people on the ground, women and men. It’s a step toward bringing human rights into real life.”\n
During 2011 there was a significant drought in Argentina. The limited official information led people to enter information into www.agrotestigo.crowdmap.com (Ushahidi platform). AgroTestigo consolidated and analyzed the information to calculate the actual agricultural production based on the opinion of the crowd.\n
What can kids do? What if a map is not an information tool but a teaching change tool? This is the 2012 AP Economics Class at Lowell High School in San Francisco, taught by Kristin B. Lubenow. They mapped the Cost of Chicken. Apparently, this is a base line measurement for food costs around the world. They learned that kids don’t know where their food comes from. The kids in India asked for category to map the cost of candy, because candy is very expensive in India. What else can we learn about food production and sustainability by collaborating with maps. \n\n\n
Olga Werby, Mapster and President of Pipspeak Productions\nShe has taught interaction design at the American University in Paris, the University of California Berkeley Extension Program, San Francisco State’s Multimedia Studies Program, the Bay Area Video Coalition, and Apple Computers. And she is a talented artist.\n
Even children are trying to activate change outside the traditional methods or institutional structures: Amrita of Bangalore, India (8.5 years old) is a Trusted Food Reporter for the Cost of Chicken Project; kids from around the world are collecting data on local food conditions, from grade 8 students in San Francisco to grade 3 students in India; students are mapping to learn and collaborate about food production and food sustainability.\n
Ushahidi has been used for various civil society actions as well including human rights, corruption mapping and environmental issues. This mapper wanted to highlight peak oil issues, so they mapped them on Antarctica for more visibility. It also includes a layer of data from Powercuts.in. by Ajay Kumar\nThere are also a few petrol shortage maps. Each of these maps aim to amplify the issue of environmental sustainability. Teams of people plan around a map, they build community, they teach each other about important topics. \n
Ushahidi has been used for social entrepreneurship. "Watertracker enables rural communities throughout Afghanistan to report on the working condition of local water wells using a toll-free multi-language IVR. This IVR service integrates with an Ushahidi instance that stores and maps detailed information about thousands of water points throughout the country. When community calls are completed the site displays malfunctioning well reports instantaneously on a country map. A Watertracker monitor listens to recorded IVR messages from communities, before responding to the community via mobile in order to provide technical assistance to help them resolve the technical issues that they face. The application was deployed in country in October 2011 by the Sustainable Water Supply and Sanitation project (SWSS), a USAID-supported rural infrastructure initiative. Watertracker's toll-free IVR service is the ongoing contribution of Roshan, Afghanistan's leading mobile operator. The application's development was conceived and managed by Arc Finance, a US-based NGO. In 2012 Watertracker's management will be transferred from SWSS to the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD), and will ultimately incorporate nearly 100,000 wells throughout the the country."     (Picture by 'Sustainable Water Supply and Sanitation (SWSS) Project’ in April 2012 (Kapisa, Afghanistan) What is most important about this map is that is local owned, in their languages and giving them power to share and change their country’s water tracking. It is also a teaching tool which will allow people to get the help they need to learn how to fix their wells. \n\n
So, that leads me to lessons.\nOne key lesson is, a successful map takes more than just deploying code to the server.\nIt actually requires a lot outreach, branding, promotion, monitoring and an effective process.\n
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Govts are frustrated that the data they have released is not being used . Is this because data release is driven mainly by the supply side not the demand side? Are Govts releasing what they want to release not what is wanted? How do we identify data that will be useful to the grassroots? We can crowdsource demand for data. eg The national tax payer alliance in kenya has shown that when commitites demand and receive relevant data, they become more engaged and empowered. There are rural communities suing MPs for misusing CDF funds They knew about this misappropriation of funds because of availability of relevant data.\n\nThe key to behavioural change, lies in feedback loops, as exemplified by the incredible success of platforms like facebook and twtter, whicih are dashboards of our social lives and that of our networks. What if we had a dashboard of accountabilty and transparency for the govt?\nOr a way to find out if services funded and promised for the public were indeed delivered at the service level of the said services? The concept of Huduma in Kenya showed an eraly prototype of what such a dashboar would look like, and we are looking tino more ways of using the ushahidi platform to provide for this specific use case. Partnership announcements will be made in due course\n
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Continuing with partnerships to make high impact projects in Kenya, US and various countries. Increased capacity with our external projects team to roll out projects quickly. \n
A redesign of Crowdmap is currently underway; it will be a more user centric view of maps and data with the goal of making information directly relevant to individuals and for submitted information to bubble up to topic/country level maps that have a meta view. The users of Crowdmap will have the option of using ESRI basemaps they would like. \n
As always, our mobile applications continue to be central to our plans. From apps in use in Beijing, to our simple SMS Sync application. (It has been downloaded more than 5000 times and allows any Android phone owner to be an SMS gateway. One to many communication has never been easier) \n
Locally in San Diego, there is a whitelabelled application called Aztecast. It is a free mapping tool for the San Diego State University Campus community to post and share news events happening around campus. \n
What if Crowdsourcing met the Internet of Things? The nexus of qualitative data from the crowd and hard data from sensors? \n
The internet of things is the idea that just as citizens are networked, sensors can provide key information and be instrumented to report back. This is a trash tracker sensor by the MIT Senseable City lab, the sensor was placed in trash bags to help understand the flow of waste and recycling systems. It is very illuminating work.\n
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Safecast is another interesting initiative that pulls in sensor data about radiation in Japan from citizens. Providing it in an open, accessible manner. \n
What good is a smart city without Smart Citizens without relevant information? The work going on now to simplify Ushahidi and Crowdmap is geared towards making the feedback loop of data, citizen engagement and we hope... change to be complete. We are just scratching the surface of what is possible. The educators in the room, how can you use these tools, arduino and open source resources to make, share and collect relevant info, from pollution, to water quality to health care systems? To tackle our biggest challenges, we each have a role to play. Ours is to provide the tools :) \n
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The Plan (our idea, the pitch):  Looking at the view from the crowd, providing the curation by the crowd to archive a dynamic crowdsourced history of the olympic games. \nFor the IOC it is a form of simplified monitoring of social media because the digital team will be stretched and will just be buried in the massive amounts of information. Thus => CrowdSource the filter of information. \n\nAn example of fans of Kenyan runners curating information about that; sharing and discussing the olympics in real time.  (We can preset some filters, but can also see how people set filters on the kind of stars they are tracking)\n
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There are more than 600 million mobile subscribers in Africa. That is only part of the story. The question to ask, is what are the kinds of information they can access or contribute to with their mobiles? It is a tough question because we can achieve more social impact if the mobile subscribers have information about health, education and environment at their fingertips - as well they currently have mobile money. Our work encompasses these three realms, so does our community and strategy.\n
We have a team in Liberia doing some important work with the NGO community\n
Our home base of Nairobi where you are welcome to have coffee, run workshops and share what technology can do to achieve change. \n
From collective intelligence to action. Be it from citizens, policy makers or leaders, we can use available data and technology to do more. \n
download reports from an Ushahidi instance into ArcGIS for advanced visualization and analysis.  The Add-In also includes the ability to translate incident categories and descriptive information.\nhttp://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=f2cc3c6018a745a4aaa38c15e68b2df0\n\n
Ushahidi is an open source community, and always looking for translators, developers, testers and mappers and partners. We would like to push technology to do more for our communities, in helping to solve many of our problems. It is not just technology or dots on a map. It is a community of people engaged to act. To collect information, to use citizen science and to flesh out their ideas on the skeleton we have provided and continue to support. Thank you for your kind attention. \n